Mabwoga Samson Okongo, Thukral Ashwani Kumar
Department of Botanical and Environmental Sciences, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, 143 005 Punjab India ; School of Tourism and Natural Resources Management, Department of Environment, Forestry and Agriculture, Maasai Mara University, P.O. Box 861-20500, Narok, Kenya.
Department of Botanical and Environmental Sciences, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, 143 005 Punjab India.
Springerplus. 2014 Oct 1;3:576. doi: 10.1186/2193-1801-3-576. eCollection 2014.
The increasing population in the developing countries has rendered wetlands vulnerable to land use changes. Remote sensing offers a rapid and efficient means of data acquisition of ecosystems in time and space. The present study was undertaken to identify changes in the Harike wetland, a Ramsar site in the state of Punjab, India; and identify causal factors, as well as vulnerable areas threatened from the land cover changes. Unsupervised classification and post-classification change detection techniques were applied to Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) data of 16-10-1989, 22-10-2000 and 26-10-2010. Images were classified into five land cover classes (1) Waterbody, (2) Wetland I, (3) Wetland II, (4) Barren land and (5) Agricultural land. Land cover change is characterized mainly by a decrease in the wetland area, as indicated by decrease in wetland vegetation and an increase in non-wetland areas, characterized by increasing agricultural and barren land areas. Overall, the wetland shrunk by 13% from 1989 to 2010, with the north-eastern side experiencing maximum shrinkage. The wetland needs immediate reclamation to check it from further shrinkage so as to save its biodiversity.
发展中国家不断增长的人口使湿地容易受到土地利用变化的影响。遥感提供了一种在时间和空间上快速高效获取生态系统数据的手段。本研究旨在识别印度旁遮普邦拉姆萨尔湿地哈里凯湿地的变化；确定因果因素以及受土地覆盖变化威胁的脆弱区域。对1989年10月16日、2000年10月22日和2010年10月26日的陆地卫星专题制图仪（TM）和增强型专题制图仪Plus（ETM+）数据应用了非监督分类和分类后变化检测技术。图像被分为五类土地覆盖类型：（1）水体，（2）湿地I，（3）湿地II，（4）裸地和（5）农业用地。土地覆盖变化的主要特征是湿地面积减少，表现为湿地植被减少，非湿地面积增加，表现为农业用地和裸地面积增加。总体而言，从1989年到2010年，湿地面积缩小了13%，其中东北侧萎缩最为严重。该湿地需要立即进行开垦，以防止其进一步萎缩，从而保护其生物多样性。
